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Video: Polar Bears Seeking Ice Will Warm and Chill Your Heart

ICTMN Staff

7/6/14

Polar bears are known for swimming hundreds if not thousands of miles to find the ice upon which they live and breed. Equally well known is the fact that sea ice is dissipating at an alarming rate in the Arctic, which forces the iconic white bears to swim farther than they are able. Sometimes their cubs don’t make it.

Here, filmmaker Adam Ravetch of Arctic Bear Productions, gets this entire drama on video shot by the bears themselves. Attaching a GoPro camera to the massive mammals, he set them off swimming, retrieved the footage and made this video. For this and other such ventures he collaborated with Anthony Pagano, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who is studying polar bears’ response to sea ice decreases. They are the team who brought us the recent polar bear selfie video.

The cameras, as Care2.com pointed out, provide a way to see what bears are actually going through.

“With video collars that can survive the cold temperatures now being added to scientists’ toolkits, they can now observe more about life from a polar bear’s perspective,” Care2.com said in a recent story.

This would seem to buttress the arguments of those who say that creating polar bear sanctuaries is beside the point, since the issue is lack of ice, not poaching or lack of protection.